RODRIGO Roa Duterte, the 16th President of the Republic of the Philippines, whose term ends at noon today, earned an important place in our country’s history. He will be remembered as the president whose term saw a fundamental shift in the way presidential politics is done.

He did not attend his own proclamation. He wore the barong in a way that challenged decorum.

He cursed the Pope, heads of states and governments, and even God. He made fun of women’s anatomy, publicly attempted to touch a house helper even as he confessed actually touching one in his youth. He openly quarreled with his enemies, and his will to punish found manifestation in a senator landing in jail, a critic being convicted of libel and ABS-CBN denied its franchise even if he may not have openly ordered his people to exact revenge on his behalf. He is also willing to defend his friends and allies who may be in trouble.

He made promises which he actually did not keep, not for lack of will, but simply because the problems were too big that his bravado was not enough. He promised to end corruption and the drug problem. He managed to apprehend smaller players in both leagues, from the petty drug dealers to the corrupt officials at the lower echelons of power. But he was not able to snare the bigger fish.

He promised to adopt a federal system of government that he even appointed a committee to prepare the draft for changing the Constitution, but he later abandoned the move. He vowed to end labor contractualization but vetoed a law that precisely wanted to do that.

He said that he would fight for our rights in the West Philippine Sea, and even threatened to ride a jetski bearing the Philippine flag toward the Chinese vessels entering our exclusive economic zone. He later did a 180-degree turn and called the arbitral ruling issued at The Hague as a useless piece of paper. For a man so used to declaring war against drugs, corruption, Leila de Lima and ABS-CBN, he repeatedly used his fear of war against China as his justification for not being assertive enough in relation to our rights.

While I did not vote for him, I tried to give him my support early on in his presidency. However, I am a progressive liberal, and there are just too many policy directions and actions which Duterte adopted that I simply cannot tolerate. Foremost of this is his war on drugs which spawned a deadly trail of human rights abuses. While he may not have been directly involved in the atrocities, he has certainly created the impetus for a culture of impunity that regressed into abusive power that led to the unwarranted deaths of many. Another area where I had serious misgivings is Duterte’s tepid reaction to, if not toleration of, China’s incursions in the West Philippine Sea.

But despite my fundamental disagreements with Duterte, I must admit that there are areas where he performed well. There is no doubt that Duterte was able to navigate the Republic through the pandemic. While I was somewhat skeptical of the initial strategy, it is now apparent that our country has somewhat outperformed other countries in our Covid-19 response. His accomplishments in the area of infrastructure are impressive. What he did to clean up Boracay is a powerful exhibit of the good his audacity can do.

Duterte is a president whose authenticity was easily loved by his supporters, but was also easily hated by his critics. I credit him for brutally confronting conventional elite practices. He practically trolled the entire nation with his transgressions of protocol. He rocked the foundations of elite politics with his open assault on his political enemies. I may have agreed with the substance of the politics of elite intellectuals and activists, but I cheered Duterte as he symbolically threw eggs on the faces of elite institutions and their holier than thou arrogance.

Unfortunately, Duterte’s trolling of the elites and his undermining of their power base have engendered a kind of toxicity that lopsidedly divided the country. While he commanded loyalty from his solid and diehard supporters that formed the majority that saw his popularity soar, he became the reincarnated Marcos to the eyes of the smaller but noisier political opposition that almost despised him.

It is not necessarily the fault of Duterte. In fact, it can even be argued that he is simply the embodiment of the political ramifications of an already divided polity that cleaved along a privileged antiMarcos minority and the larger half of society whose voices were excluded and silenced. Duterte ascended the presidency in 2016 as a form of vengeance by this greater half of the elites and the Liberal Party that represented them.

Duterte as president missed the golden opportunity to become an agent who could have mended the fracturing nation and country. Instead, he became the battering ram that further fueled the anger and resentment between the two sides of the unevenly divided political landscape that are at war with each other. This anger and resentment, now amplified by social media, further intensified, and became even more visible in the recently concluded elections.

Duterte is undoubtedly popular. One is therefore puzzled that Duterte’s non-endorsement of Marcos Jr. did not dampen the latter’s winnability. Apparently, the Marcos brand may be the only thing that can check Duterte’s appeal.

There is no doubt that the political alignment of the narratives of the Dutertes and the Marcoses is a celebration of the numerical superiority of the forces against the elites that directed the post-Marcos and post-martial law narratives. One can either interpret Marcos Jr. as Duterte 2.0 or Duterte as the front act for Marcos Jr. And as Marcos Jr. inherited the political capital of his father, Duterte the father has bequeathed his to his daughter.